Hooray for Oprah
By BRUCE BRADSHAW
Pastor, Zion Mennonite Church, Elbing
The editors of national newspapers have given Oprah Winfrey considerable attention recently. She endorsed James Frey's book, "A Million Little Pieces," then confronted him when she learned some of its content was not true. Frey defended his book, arguing the book is true because the ideas are true, whether or not the information is factual.
I have struggled to find integrity in Frey's statements; they ask everyone who writes to consider how much liberty we can take with stories before our publications become fictitious. In my own writing, I have interpreted and reinterpreted the same stories to generate new ideas. The stories are true, but the interpretations might be flawed. We still can call the writing true, at least until we find flaws in the interpretations.
Frey reversed this logic. He evidently did not start with the stories, but started with ideas and created stories to support his ideas, reducing his writing to fiction. He might have passed beyond the boundaries of truth into the realm of fiction, finding that truth is stranger than fiction.
When I shared this understanding of Frey with a friend, he asked: "What about the stories in the Bible that are not factual; are they true?" He wanted to support Frey's logic with the Bible.
The statement is fodder for some interesting discussions. The gospel writers evidently framed the same stories differently, giving them various interpretations. The story of Jesus clearing the temple, for example, is in the beginning of the Gospel of John and at the end of the other Gospels, raising questions of whether Jesus cleared the temple twice, or whether the Gospel writers interpreted one story in multiple ways. Is the story true in the different Gospel accounts? Church tradition affirms the story and the multiple interpretations of the story are true.
This struggle between the truth, facts, ideas, and stories has coined a new word, "truthiness," which the American Dialect Society declared as the word of the year for 2005. Truthiness supports Frey's conviction that truth exists in ideas, apart from facts. Ideas can be true, but not factual. The truth of a matter does not have to be limited to the facts of a matter.
Truthiness challenges us to realize we perceive truth from interpretations; we base interpretations on facts; our interpretations can be partial and they also can be flawed. We really don't know whether Jesus cleared the temple twice or whether John and the other gospel writers interpreted the same story differently.
While truthiness has some value, reminding us of our dependency on interpretations, it also is dangerous, entertaining claims that something is true regardless of the facts.
The theological term for truthiness is original sin. The serpent said to Eve, "certainly, you will not die if you eat the fruit of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil." Why was the knowledge of the tree of good and evil forbidden? It was forbidden because it gave Adam and Eve the power to declare what is good and evil, apart from facts. God reserved that privilege for himself and Oprah refused to let Frey take it. Hooray for Oprah.
